It took Mormon Utah to say no to Donald Trump’s bombastic, boastful, bullying, and vulgar campaign style. That was the message from Tuesday’s primaries. Those who identify themselves as Born Again and Evangelical Christians continued to vote for Trump in Arizona, as they have across the South. Not so in Utah where Trump was overwhelmingly rejected by Republican voters. Utah is about 65 percent Mormon. Ted Cruz, himself an Evangelical Christian, won largely Mormon Utah, Tuesday, with an overwhelming 69.2 percent of the vote, thereby garnering all of its 40 delegates to the Republican convention. He lost Arizona with a large evangelical population In Utah, Donald Trump finished a distant third, behind John Kasich with only 14 percent of the caucus vote. In raw vote terms, Cruz won over 122,100 voters , in Utah, to Trump’s 24,782. Idaho is another state with a large Mormon population. In Idaho, Ted Cruz earlier won with 45.4 percent of the vote to Trump’s 28.1 percent (with Rubio still in the race when Idaho voted, he...

The long heralded Super Tuesday is now behind us. It actually revealed some surprising things. First of all, on the Republican side, it showed that Donald Trump, though clearly holding a sizable lead, is neither unbeatable or the inevitable nominee. Marco Rubio finally broke through with a win in the Minnesota caucuses. Incidentally, Donald Trump, after earlier in the evening boasting how he’d never finished worse than second in any primary–did just that by finishing a well beaten third in Minnesota. Cruz prevailed in his “must win” home state of Texas, beating Donald Trump there by 17 percentage points. Marco Rubio failed to meet the minimum threshold and, given the proportional method of allocating delegates, allowed a few more delegates to slip to Trump, as well, of course, to Cruz–which is less important than Trump’s pickup, as the game now is “Stop Trump” (from reaching the magic number of 1237 delegates needed to secure the nomination).Starting on March 15, wins will go a lot further towards nomination since a number of them will...

On the Republican side, Donald Trump definitely has that elusive characteristic known as “momentum” after big wins in South Carolina and in the Nevada caucus. Lost in all of the efforts to create a “bandwagon effect,” are the facts that: 1) Trump’s margin of victory in South Carolina was less than polls taken just a week earlier indicated suggesting late voters actually split away from supporting him, and 2) The Nevada caucus reflects a small subset of a state with small numbers of voters. For example, the total number of Hispanic voters in the entrance and exit polls was only 175 souls. Yet this is widely cited as support for Trump’s claim that, despite his perceived insults to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, Hispanics “love” him (along with every other group). The difference between Trump and the next highest candidate, from that small subset was only about 20 votes (variation depending on which poll was cited), and a majority of the Republican Hispanics voted for others than Donald Trump. A single Hispanic voter for...

The latest post-holiday polls are in for Iowa–the home of the first Republican Primary (actually Iowa employs a caucus attendee voting mechanism to select their convention delegates). Iowa is now a toss-up between Cruz and Trump in the Republican caucuses. Rubio and Carson duke it out for third. Sanders moves within striking distance of Hillary on the Democratic side. Behind the headline numbers, a deeper look into the polls reveals some interesting points. But first the top line numbers. Two new Republican caucus polls from Iowa have been released in the past 24 hours: The Public Policy Polling (PPP), and the highly respected Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll. They both show the Republican race very close, with PPP having Trump over Cruz 28 percent to 26 per cent, while the Iowa poll shows Cruz on top, 25 percent to 22 percent. Rubio is third in both polls–15 points behind Rubio. Carson is a point further back in fourth place in the Iowa poll and 5 points behind Rubio in the PPP poll. The other...

The Quinnipiac national poll, released Tuesday, December 22, showed Trump with 28 percent, just a 4 percent lead over Ted Cruz–his closest rival (and the leader two recent Iowa Polls). The significance of the Quinnipiac poll is that it was taken over the period of December 16th to 20th; hence it was the first national poll administered, at least in significant part, following Trump’s praising of Putin’s authoritarian regime. Just as it appeared that Trump’s campaign was finally showing signs of imploding, a second poll was released, this one by CNN. The two polls showed unusual variance, not only in terms of absolute numbers, but in direction of change–at least for Trump. The CNN poll was taken the 17th to 21st. It showed Trump at 39 percent, a full 21 percentage point lead over Cruz. Some variance among polls is to be expected early in the primary season. But not like this. Obviously pollsters are having a difficult time modeling the likely voter. To understand what I mean about “modeling the likely voter,”...

On the eve of Tuesday’s important Republican debate, all eyes, once again, are on Donald Trump. As most readers of this blog are aware, early last week Trump made his most inflammatory anti-Muslim proposal to date*, calling for: “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States (until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on).” He compounded the invective by citing, as precedent, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. His proposal followed the bombings in Paris and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. By applying a religious test for admission, most constitutional scholars felt that it was unconstitutional. Others noted that the internment of Japanese-Americans is considered one of the darkest governmental acts in U.S. history. Condemnation of Trump was immediate. Nearly all Republican leaders and candidates (with the notable exception of Ted Cruz) denounced Trump’s proposal as “un-American,” “disgusting,” “not who we are,” and much worse. Several said it disqualified him from being the Republican nominee. He was, many said, playing...